No, I'm pretty sure that Apple will continue to swallow up 95% of the money and market-share generated from the ongoing stream of Open Source

Apple will never be considered for this kind of program as long as they have a weak commitment to backwards compatibility. That's essentially why Korea is leaving Microsoft here (and Microsoft has a lot of backwards compatibility, you just have to pay for it).

The Linux Desktop is already here. In and amongst the pissing contest in early markets consoles; watches, home, health between Apple and Google (What happened to Microsoft). Chrome OS got Android compatibility and Office Update and its Office improved, massive Android integration, and Google Play . As well as some great adoption statistics. 8 OEMs making 15 distinct Chrome OS devices now on sale in 28 countries, 10 highest rated notebooks available on Amazon.com and Chromebooks sold to K-12 schools has risen 6x.

On PC desktop the QA is still terrible. For example, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS ships with a media player which does not work properly with touchpad [launchpad.net] and which crashes when the subtitle setting is changed [launchpad.net]. Also the ACPI fan speed control is broken [launchpad.net] for a bunch of laptops. Sure, the correct solution here is simply to switch from Totem to VLC, and use a different kernel for the fan problem. Easy enough... but soon enough, some other glitch pops up. As long as Linux desktops (not only Ubuntu) are filled with these nasty surprises, the support costs will be enormous for fixing all these bugs or finding workarounds for them.

Windows 8 accepts your challenge for terrible. Integral mail program doesn't do POP mail, Can't make desktop shortcuts fo rall programs, Updates borking other programs, force updates that reset preferences. And that interface from hell that forces you to do everything differently than every other OS has done for years, Approaching Unuseable when you're not on a touchscreen

There is also a bug where the initial install of Windows 8 fails to show progress when installing updates (stuck at 0%), while the backend updates worker is actually installing updates just fine. Also a bug from Windows 7 is still present: the File Explorer occasionally loses the ability to display Japanese characters properly: they are shown as squares instead. The "Burn disc" button does not work from the ribbon menu, but "Burn disc" from the right-click context menu works.

What integral mail program? As far as I know, Windows 8 doesn't come with an email client, nor is it essential anymore.

Yes, it has one.

Webmail is ubiquitous these days.

That does not make it any good.

If you need POP mail access, download one of dozens of free email clients.

That isn't the point. The point is if you have an integral mail program, you should make at least some attempt to accommodate people. Los of people still have POPmail. And the suggestions are ludicrous, from changing ISP's to opening a gmail account, then forwarding all your POPMail to that, then using the integral program to that account, and reading it in the Windows mail reader.

And yes, I've had to install T-Bird or the like.

I can't confirm your problem with making program shortcuts on the desktop. Are you talking about Metro apps? Besides, only idiots put program shortcuts on the desktop.

On PC desktop the QA is still terrible. For example, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS ships with a media player which does not work properly with touchpad [launchpad.net] and which crashes when the subtitle setting is changed [launchpad.net]. Also the ACPI fan speed control is broken [launchpad.net] for a bunch of laptops. Sure, the correct solution here is simply to switch from Totem to VLC, and use a different kernel for the fan problem. Easy enough... but soon enough, some other glitch pops up. As long as Linux desktops (not only Ubuntu) are filled with these nasty surprises, the support costs will be enormous for fixing all these bugs or finding workarounds for them.

In the heydays, immediately after the IPO, when Netscape stock price was zooming up, Marc Andreesen boasted, "The desktop is irrelevant. OS is irrelevant. The Browser is the new king of the hill" (not an exact quote). Microsoft took the threat seriously, fought hard, fought dirty, and killed Netscape as a company. But it could not kill the idea. It won the battle with Netscape but lost the war with the browser.

Once someone with serious financial muscle, namely Google, took up the idea, it was game over for

Here in the Netherlands we do that all the time. It costs us billions of euros in useless infrastructure and failed ICT projects. Especially with big ICT projects our government has a failure rate of nearly 100%.

No bloody way, Samsung, LG and Android say so. Android has been the spear to finally kill the beast of Redmond dominance of the desktop. Many tech companies in Korea will not want the government to subsidise M$ at their triple expense ie paying for it to happen in training at schools and then paying again to retrain those students and paying yet again with regard to all of their interactions with government.

LG and Samsung are both big on Linux which of course underlies Android and they will want to exten

For the most common purposes, like text documents and spreadsheets there is already ODF.It is even an ISO standard. Unless there are unexpected problems with things like Asian fonts, that should be a no-brainer.

Korea is very tightly wed to Microsoft. I've seen linux on some servers and of course embedded devices, but I have never seen it on the desktop there. A huge amount of the software is Windows only, with both Mac and Linux users completely locked out.
It's a pretty conservative, conformist culture - especially at a government level.

Korea is very tightly wed to Microsoft. I've seen linux on some servers and of course embedded devices, but I have never seen it on the desktop there. A huge amount of the software is Windows only, with both Mac and Linux users completely locked out.
It's a pretty conservative, conformist culture - especially at a government level.

So you figure that conservatives like that yummy Metro interface along with all the other mutant W8 features?

So you figure that conservatives like that yummy Metro interface along with all the other mutant W8 features?

Much easier for conservatives to adapt to Windows 8 having used previous versions. Few could tolerate the switch to a GNU/Linux desktop, which in almost all flavors resembles an aborted fetus with Down's syndrome.

All it tells me is that no matter how annoyed people get with Microsoft/Windows, they'd rather stick with that they know, and more importantly, what everyone else uses. Windows 8 is different yes but so long as you work out how to clock on the Desktop tile the actual desktop interface is extremely similar to previous versions of Windows, including the ability to run all the software people have built up a library of. Changing operating systems is more trouble than it's worth for most people. Easier to just

The Dear Shrimp has ordered me to inform you that you will be killed with a thousand deaths for asking such a malicious and war-mongering statement. Several missiles will be sent to annoy the fish very, very soon. You've been warned!!!

Korea (presumably South Korea) is infatuated with Microsoft tech. ActiveX is used everywhere - banks, online shopping, even gateways for various official and private services. Despite the technological marvel that South Korea is at times, Active X & Internet Explorer are the apex of their Internet communications and Linux is basically not used anywhere. For open source to work, there will have to be a complete shakeup of how everyone uses computers and the Internet over there, including non-Government b

Also illegal, so far... It's illegal to use something other than the ActiveX plugin authorized by the Korean government to do online banking in South Korea. The current president promised to change things, but so far, nothing has changed. Here's his promise being reported:

The problem is that Korea requires use of their own national encryption standard, which has a governmental back door (and for which exploits have already been demonstrated at BlackHat) in order to "secure" banking transactions from snooping by foreign powers (guess they called that one correctly).

Here are some other articles about where the plugin is required to establish secure communications channels:

The problem is that Korea requires use of their own national encryption standard, which has a governmental back door (and for which exploits have already been demonstrated at BlackHat) in order to "secure" banking transactions from snooping by foreign powers (guess they called that one correctly).

[citation needed]

Can you provide a link to the paper/presentation in which the exploit and/or backdoor has been shown?

A quick search doesn't turn anything up, but "seed" is a bit of a generic term (and is also used in reference to RNG in crypto) and so there's a lot of noise.

Here's another algorithm indicating identity exposure (SEED's keying system is specifically designed to *always* expose identity, which means that a lot of sites aren't very secure, since they can know who the culprit was, they don't figure they need to secure them):

Am I seriously the only one annoyed that people say "Korea" (the peninsula) when they mean "the Republic of Korea" (South Korea), or rarely, "the People's Republic of Korea" (North Korea)? When I hear people mention they enjoyed their trip to Korea, I ask how they liked Pyongyang.

I followed the first link in TFA ("Korea IT News") to find out, and even that did not tell me. Then I noticed a reference to "the capital city of Seoul" in the last line, but it was not clear that it did not relate to a different story. Even assuming Seoul was the capital concerned, I confess that I could not remember whether it was North or the South (not being American, I am not as close to the subject) so I went to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] and, incredibly, even that does not tell you.

It's always the RoK when people just say Korea. If a news organization is talking about North Korea they will specifically spell out that NORTH Korea did XYZ. It's analogous to having two Bobs in one house. One's an average dude, while the other locks himself in his room, stepping out every once in awhile to brag about how awesome his 2" penis is. In everyday conversions, they'll be Bob and crazy Bob.

Open Source will thrive when documents mandate that every device must be accompanied by a document describing how this will be programmed. In other way you buy an NVIDIA card or an smart phone and you get a PDF that gives detailed specification of how software can use the device (not how it is manufactured) to get the advertised functionality. this should extended to all sub-components that interact with the software. Using undocumented functionality should be illegal since it is a means to provide illegal

The death of WinXP support should be a huge boon to the ReactOS project..

Looks like it needs a huge boon, being still only in alpha. I don't think the South Korean Government will be going that way, nor many others. I would put ReactOS in a similar category to the projects to maintain OS/2 (eg eComStation) and DOS (eg FreeDOS), very small niches.

That is how these situations have traditionally been resolved. A government or a big company cringes the big price of Windows upgrade, maybe mentions Linux. After a couple of days, receives a special discount from Microsoft, and world goes on just like yesterday.

Actually would be interesting to know what is going on inside Microsoft's marketing department right now. They must be working real hard how to get China back on the upgrade wagon, for example. After all, even Billy G has said that even the worst ca

MS has their programmers and then their designers. The linux world is missing designers. Linux needs an intuitive and stable DE. All DE's that I have tried are buggy and feels like I'm running windows 98.